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The ‘King of Revenge Porn‘ and ‘professional life ruiner’ has been handed a 2.5 year sentence for hacking into computers to steal naked pictures.

Scourge of the internet and peeping tom Hunter Moore has been locked up. The so-called ‘revenge porn king’ was given a two and a half year sentence recently after pleading guilty to computer hacking and aggravated identity theft in February

‘Revenge porn’ is the act of publishing intimate photos on public forums and social media sites without the subject’s consent, with the intent of publicly humiliating those featured in them. Moore set up IsAnyoneUp.com in 2010 after what Moore described in less forgiving terms as a particularly painful break up. The site was immensely popular, attracting 30 million hits a month and more than £6,000 a month from ad revenue.

Sometimes describing himself as a ‘professional life ruiner’, Moore would post pictures of naked women and men on the site. Some of these would come from vengeful ex boyfriends and girlfriends, hence ‘revenge porn’, and others pictures, some say up to 40 percent, would be literally stolen from private computers, with the aid of sidekick, Charlie Evens.

At the time of their arrest The FBI released a statement explaining their crimes: “Moore allegedly instructed Evens to gain unauthorised access to – in other words, to hack into – victims’ e-mail accounts. Moore sent payments to Evens in exchange for nude photos obtained unlawfully from the victims’ accounts. Moore then posted the illegally obtained photos on his website, without the victims’ consent. The indictment alleges that Evens hacked into email accounts belonging to hundreds of victims.”

Evens was 23 when he was hired by Moore. He told CNN Money earlier in the year that he met Moore after hacking him, he then promised to pay him to do the same on unsuspecting girls, which he did for about four months largely using social engineering hacks. He also told CNN that through much of his time with Moore, he felt disconnected from the actual harm he was doing: “It doesn’t feel real, when I’m in my room, lights off, door locked, drinking … you don’t feel the consequences. And then I’d go straight out and party with friends and try not to think about it.”

Not only were these photos posted without the permission of their owners but often contact details would be posted along with those photos as well as links back to their social media accounts. The victims of Moore and stars of IsAnyoneUp.com regularly reported being harassed, shunned from social groups, threatened with firing and along with the expected emotional stress, stalked. Moore’s behaviour clearly did not come without repercussions, as his recent sentencing proves. But aside from that expected legal threat, Moore was also stabbed with a pen by one woman who had been unfortunate enough to have her photo posted on his website.

Moore sold the site in 2012, claiming he no longer had the energy to manage the site which was so regularly the target of legal threats and subject to several embarrassing moments where images of children as young as nine were posted.

Moore undoubtedly caused widespread shame, embarrassment and material damage to people’s lives but he was also attended by throngs of fans who would voluntarily send naked photos of themselves to Moore and called themselves in classic california-cult style ‘#thefamily’

While Moore was assaulted with plenty of legal threats he was apparently protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects the owners of websites from facing the legal consequences of content posted by that sites users.

In 2013, California’s state legislature criminalised ‘revenge porn’, at which point Hunter took to the internet to claim that laws like this were serious infringements upon “people’s rights and freedoms”. This new law however, did not stop Moore. The law that was passed only applied to those who both took the photos in confidence and then distribute them. Moore only distributed the photos and thus escaped the clutches of California state law.

All the while, Moore claimed that he was merely a businessman taking advantage of people who had already surrendered their sense of modesty by sending compromising photos of themselves to then-loved ones. This argument may have had some weight, however objectionable, if Moore had not actively conspired to hack into people’s computers and steal their nude photos, with Evens.

Moore was arrested along with Evens at the beginning of 2014 by the FBI who charged both of them with conspiracy as well as seven counts of unauthorised access to a protected computer to obtain information and seven counts of aggravated identity theft. Moore has been sentenced to two and a half years followed by three years of supervised release a fine of £1,300. Evens was sentenced to two years and one month.

Revenge porn was legislated against in the UK in Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 which hands down sentences of up to two years for distributing a private sexual image of someone without consent and with the intention of causing them distress. There have been several notable cases of its use since it came into law in February this year, the youngest of which was a 17 year old who distributed indecent photos of a 14 year old girl. Other reports have said that victims of revenge porn have been as young as 12. As of October this year, there have been 200 reported cases of revenge Porn, most of which involved pictures of women distributed by their ex-boyfriends.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid spoke to SCMagazineUK.com, saying that: “We are really pleased that revenge pornography has been made a criminal offence in England and Wales”. She added that: “We know that for a lot of women they have problems when their photos have been uploaded to websites that are not within the UK and they have found it difficult to get them take down or have had to pay to have them removed.… Read the rest

A Kansas City man who admitted he threatened to post nude photos of a 16-year-old girl if she wouldn’t have sex with him was sentenced Tuesday in Platte County Circuit Court to 18 years in prison.

Denis Aguilar, 23, pleaded guilty in February to attempted child enticement and attempted statutory sodomy for the threats he made in April 2014.

According to court records, the victim and her mother alerted Kansas City police after Aguilar requested nude photos of the teen. After the girl sent him photos, Aguilar threatened to post them online, said Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd.

The girl told investigators that she was on a social network website that she thought barred users over 18. The teen and Aguilar met on the website and began communicating through other social media sites, Zahnd said.

Aguilar told the girl he was 18 and repeatedly asked her to send him nude photos. She said she sent him a photo thinking he would “back off” and then stopped communicating with him. However, Aguilar continued to send messages to her and became angry when she wouldn’t respond.

He then threatened to post her photo if she didn’t send another nude photo. She sent a topless photo of herself and then he said he would post the pictures if she did not have sex with him, Zahnd said.

The victim allowed investigators to use her online identity. The detective soon began communicating with Aguilar.

Using the victim’s online identity, the detective portrayed himself as another girl, this one 14. Aguilar asked to meet the 14-year-old for sex.

They arranged to meet last June 25 at a McDonald’s restaurant in Kansas City, North. Police arrested Aguilar moments after he arrived.

A 31-year-old Seattle man was sentenced to one year in jail on Friday for posting nude photos of women on two different websites in a bizarre case of “revenge porn.”

Jeremy “Silo” Walters, a photographer and computer technician, pleaded guilty to first-degree computer trespass and four counts of cyberstalking, a gross misdemeanor charge. He faced a standard sentence of up to 90 days behind bars, but agreed to an exceptional sentence for abusing the trust of one victim and to avoid prosecution for a domestic-violence charge involving a woman he apparently dated for a time.

According to charging documents, Walters was hired by a woman in June 2011 through an ad posted on Craigslist to transfer data from an old computer to a new one. Included on her hard drive were several hundred explicit photos a friend had taken of the woman, along with nude “selfies” she had stored for her personal use, the papers say.

More than two years later, in December 2013, the woman began receiving threatening phone calls from Walters, the papers say. He threatened to send naked photos of the woman to her family and friends if she refused to “play along,” then threatened to rape her and gang rape her with his friends, charging papers say.

After calling police, the woman received a message from a friend in England who said nude photos of the woman were posted on the revenge-porn site myex.com, the papers say. The following day, she got another phone call and Walters again threatened to send the photos to her loved ones if she refused his sexual demands, according to the charges.

In the days and weeks after the first post to myex.com, he sent links to the photos to her friends and family, charging papers say.

A friend conducted a forensic examination on the woman’s computer, determined that her machine hadn’t been hacked and concluded the photos had been stolen directly off her hard drive, the papers say.

In February, the woman picked Walters’ photo out of a montage, telling police he was the man she paid $60 to transfer her data, according to the charges. In June, Seattle detectives served a search warrant on Walters’ apartment near North Seattle College, and police say Walters admitted to posting the photos because he was angry at the woman and gave detectives an external hard drive where he had stored the photos, the papers say.

He was charged with first-degree computer trespass, a felony, and cyberstalking on June 27.

In August, he was charged with two additional counts of cyberstalking for posting nude photos of two other women on myex.com around the same time he posted photos of the first woman, court records show. The documents don’t provide information about how he obtained the other victims’ photos, but one of those women appears to have been a former girlfriend — and the charge pertaining to her carries an allegation of domestic violence.

On Monday, the same day he entered his guilty pleas, Walters was charged with a fourth count of cyberstalking for posting a nude photo of a fourth woman on Craigslist in January, the court records say. Those charging papers don’t provide details on how Walters is suspected of obtaining that photo.

On May 13, the European Union’s highest court struck what appeared to be a significant blow for privacy, ruling that Google could be forced to delete links and other sensitive information about a user upon his or her request. In an age of rampant identity theft and data breaches, as well as more sinister, personal examples of private data going public such as revenge porn, this was a win worth celebrating. And it has many questioning if such a law could ever pass in the United States.

The short answer: No. “The publication of truthful fact, in a public forum, is robustly protected by the first amendment,” says Lee Rowland, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. From a strictly legal perspective, the EU’s “right to be forgotten” decision would be a clear violation of the constitutional right to free speech. “The first amendment protects speech that is a matter of public concern. It’s not only the right to speak about it but also to hear about it,” Rowland explains.

Consider, for example, the details of the case that triggered the EU’s unappealable decision.

A Spanish attorney failed to pay his taxes and had to sell off property in a public auction. A newspaper ran the details of said auction, as newspapers do. That information made its standard way to the Internet, and Google did what Google does, supplying linked search results to it.

There was nothing illegal about the newspaper’s publication of the auction results. And as personally embarrassing as those details may have been to the attorney, Rowland believes the public has a right to know that a practicing lawyer is a confirmed tax cheat. “Imagine if there were a plastic surgeon with a legal history of doing terrible things to people’s faces,” Rowland says. “Wouldn’t you as a consumer want to be able to find evidence of those lawsuits?”

Then again, most of the people championing the EU decision aren’t disgraced lawyers hoping to scrub their own sins from the Internet. The positive response has to do with shifting the balance of power online and issuing takedown orders to companies—like Google—that collect and disseminate our private information without permission. Blunt and unconstitutional as it might be, an equivalent U.S. ruling or law could also cripple revenge porn sites, forcing them to remove nude photos and images at an individual’s request, without discussion or delay.

It’s a solution that even dedicated anti-revenge porn groups don’t want. “It’s about the expectation of privacy,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI).

The EU ruling punishes Google for indexing publicly available information, which could be of enormous value to the Spanish attorney’s current or prospective clients. That attorney has not only relinquished his expectation of privacy, but there’s good reason (arguably) for the public to have access to what the newspaper lawfully published. And while the EU has no equivalent of the first amendment, U.S. law almost always tilts in favor of free speech as a founding bulwark against entrenched, institutional corruption.

In the case of revenge porn, however, “there’s no free speech interest in publishing nude photos,” Citron says. “If someone shares nude images or permits them to be taken, when those are released, the wrong is the intentional violation of that confidentiality, not the search engine’s reproduction of it.”

The real solution, according to Citron, is to enforce laws that are already in place—in many revenge porn cases, photos are actually obtained through hacking the victim’s phone or computer—as well to pass extremely narrow legislation that specifically targets individual privacy breaches while also giving the first amendment a wide berth. The CCRI helped draft an anti-revenge porn bill in Maryland (which was unanimously approved by the Maryland’s House of Delegates this past March and is currently with the state’s senate) that more clearly defines the illegal activity and corresponding penalties. “That law would punish a very narrow set of privacy violations that have a profound impact on victims lives,” Citron says.

Yet she also believes that the new law falls short by not including a provision that would allow for the takedown of a victim’s photos and videos beyond the offender’s site. So even if those files vanish in one place, they could live on throughout the Internet.

Unrelated to revenge porn, Citron would also support regulations or legislation that allow users to demand that data brokers—the companies that track our activity online and resell that data to advertisers and other third parties—delete that collected information, on the grounds that it’s not public or of public interest.

If those sound suspiciously like requests for some version of the EU ruling—with its expansive demands for link deletion—welcome to the complex, circuitous world of digital privacy. But the key issue is, once again, the expectation of privacy. Nude photos and online spending habits are private. Proof that a lawyer was found guilty of breaking the law is not. Unlike the right to free speech, which is relatively easy to define and quite literally the first concern of the U.S. Constitution, the right to privacy is a necessarily complicated concept defined by context and exceptions. And while the two rights can come into direct conflict, freedom of speech tends to bolster privacy, allowing news outlets to cover the NSA’s more nefarious spying activities, for example.

Neither the CCRI nor the ACLU are claiming that stateside privacy laws are perfect. Citron is pushing for an update to the federal cyberstalking law that would demand a takedown of specific victim-related data if the offender is found guilty (a topic addressed at length in her book, Hate 3.0: A Civil Rights Agenda to Combat Discriminatory Online Harassment, due out this August). And Rowland is concerned about privacy violations that lead back to the government, including the public release of mugshots, even for individuals who were booked but never convicted.… Read the rest

LOS ANGELES – A notorious “revenge porn” website operator and another California man have been charged with stealing nude photos from hundreds of hacked email accounts and posting the images online.

Hunter Moore, 27, who has been dubbed by some media outlets as “the most hated man on the Internet,” was arrested Thursday at his home in Woodland. FBI agents also arrested Charles Evens, 25, of the Studio City area of Los Angeles.

Evens pleaded not guilty in a Los Angeles court while Moore appeared in court in Sacramento but didn’t enter a plea, U.S. attorney’s spokesman Thom Mrozek said.

Both remained jailed.

A 15-count federal indictment issued this week in Los Angeles charges the men with conspiracy, computer hacking, aggravated identity theft, and aiding and abetting. They could face up to five years in federal prison if convicted.

From 2010 to 2012, Moore ran a website called isanyoneup.com that posted nude and explicit photos, including some submitted to the site by former lovers and spouses without the permission of the people in them. Alongside the photos, Moore included the name and other details of the people depicted.

The photos included an “American Idol” finalist, the daughter of a major Republican donor, and a woman in a wheelchair, according to a 2012 article on Moore in Rolling Stone magazine.

According to the indictment, Evens was paid for providing Moore with nude photos that he obtained by hacking or using other means to accessing hundreds of email accounts.

In an email to Moore, Evens said what he was doing was illegal, and in other emails, Moore offered to pay Evens $200 a week and asked him to use an anonymous PayPal account to avoid detection of the scheme, according to the indictment. Evens was paid as much as $900 at one time, prosecutors contend.

Moore told BBC that he made as much as $20,000 a month in advertising revenue. He ignored cease-and-desist orders and scoffed at challenges to the ethics of his site, although in 2012 he finally sold the website to an anti-cyberbullying organization, saying his notoriety had resulted in people sending him a flood of child pornography and other images.

But he defended the site as well, even though he acknowledged in the 2012 BBC interview that posting the photos could “definitely affect someone’s livelihood.”

“I just monetize people’s mistakes that they made, and it’s kind of a shady business. But if it wasn’t me, somebody else was going to do it,” he said.

In a 2012 interview on CNN’s “Dr. Drew” show, a woman who called in to the show chastised Moore for refusing requests to remove naked selfies of her daughter and alleged they came from a hacked account.

“I’m sure she sent the pictures to a million different guys and just ended up on my site just like everybody else,” Moore said, although he added that he didn’t want to hurt her daughter.

“I`m sorry that your daughter was cyber-raped. But, I mean, now she’s educated on technology,” he added.

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